Format specification

[bkmgit]

Thanks for creating a nice plain text format that can be converted to Akoma Ntoso. To enable wider adoption, would it be possible to create a formal specification? A related effort is https://pypi.org/project/clean-law As Akoma Ntoso development is not very active, other standards bodies such as IETF could be used to publish the specification. Adding formats for other legal documents would also be helpful, for example contracts.

[longhotsummer]

Hi @bkmgit - what's your use case for Bluebell?

Akomo Ntoso is already an open standard under OASIS. It supports a wide range of structured legal documents which is why we chose it as our underlying "at rest" format and built Bluebell to support most (not all) of what AKN supports.

You could reasonably use Bluebell and AKN to structure a legal contract, since both support a generic hierarchical document format with arbitrary inline tags.

[bkmgit]

Using the format to structure a co-operative registration in India. It is quite similar to an Act. There have been several efforts and interest to enable Akomo Ntoso output from a Markup format:

• https://github.com/PDIS/md2an-web
• https://gauntlet173.github.io/post/2022-03-07_clean/
• https://github.com/Flotob/legalmarkdown
• https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Legal-AsciiDoc-td863.html
• https://github.com/BlackacreLabs/precedent
• Legal Asciidoctor asciidoctor/asciidoctor#1316

Having a set of easy to update and registered standards would help in creating further tooling. Most legal professionals can write plain text documents, but would be unlikely to write XML documents.